Category: Ultraman

Ultraman Ep. 0: The Birth of Ultraman

~ Ryan Harvey

Directed by Akio Jissoji. Written by Tetsuo Kinjo. Airdate July 10, 1966.

We have to start here — I write with some embarrassment for the poor Tsuburaya Productions team. This “pilot” episode for Ultraman is just a live stage show taped in black-and-white to promote the actual show debuting the next week. “The Birth of Ultraman” exists because Tsuburaya Pro desperately needed more time to finish episodes before the premiere date of Ultraman, and this was the quickest way for the Tokyo Broadcasting System to get something on the air to create a buffer. TBS could have gone ahead and broadcast the last remaining episode of Ultra Q, but because it wasn’t a monster-centered episode, they delayed it for over a year and a half to leap right into … this.

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Ultraman: An Introduction

~ Ryan Harvey

Ultra Q created the basic style of the Ultra series with its mixture of giant monsters and investigators of the strange and unusual, its medley of different story types that could swing from weird science and espionage to fairy tales and outright comedy. But the Ultra series wouldn’t have marched on as it did if the next show, Ultraman, didn’t add something essential for its future survival: a repeatable and appealing all-ages formula that brought in a central icon — a superhero. 

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